INTERNATIONAL: Sustainability oriented global network includes basic income has one of its pillars

The global network Sufficiency4Sustainability (S4S), which advocates for sufficiency as a path to sustainability, was just founded in late May this year. It is composed of a web of thinkers, researchers, professors and professionals devoted to promoting “the development of public policies to provide enough for all and curb overconsumption.”

Knight believes that there are critical areas of human knowledge that are, at the moment, treated separately in general, and that humankind would benefit if these were more integrated. In short, these are sustainability, exponential technologies, sufficiency, artificial intelligence, universal basic income, public policies, changing values and alternative economics. Short explanations of these areas are given at S4S website.

In representation of basic income in the S4S network, Peter Knight contacted and got the interest of BIEN’s International Advisory Board Chair Phillipe Van Parijs. The former has also developed, over the years, a close relationship with Eduardo Suplicy, also a former member of BIEN’s Executive Committee and still active basic income activist.

The S4S network is an open ended organization, whose members “are exploring how changing values and public policies might result in lower material and energy use by the relatively well-off while raising the consumption of the poor to a level sufficient to meet basic human needs, resulting in a total worldwide material and energy consumption that is ‘sustainable’ in the sense that the planet can bear it without a massive die-off of population due to exhaustion of material and environmental resources”.

The views expressed in this Op-Ed piece are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of Basic Income News or BIEN. BIEN and Basic Income News do not endorse any particular policy, but Basic Income News welcomes discussion from all points of view in its Op-Ed section.